Intel quits smartphone processor business

Within the past few days Intel has undertaken a sharp change in the company’s priorities – the chip maker will lay off 12 000 employees, which is around 11 per cent of its work force and will shift its efforts from desktop and mobile computers to cloud computing. In addition to this Intel has announced a new bold move – the company quits the smartphone processor business and cancels the Atom chip family.

Still, Intel will introduce the recently announced Apollo Lake platform but chips such as the expected SoFIA and Broxton will never appear into this world. These chips were meant to be mobile processors that would power cheap notebooks, 2-in-1 devices, and tablets. As to Apollo Lake, these processors will still appear into cheap mobile devices but this will be the last Intel chip generation for low-cost mobile devices. Cherry Trail chips will also appear for some more time but once both Cherry Trail and Apollo Lake get retired this will be it.

The announcement is good news for both Qualcomm and MediaTek since these two companies lose a major competitor. It is unclear what effects this decision will have on Intel, but the US chip maker is not a company that is used to losing battles so it may appear on the mobile SoC market once again in the not so close future. Time will tell.

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